Machine-Translation Example:

There are a few configuration settings you might want to fiddle with when setting up your instance of Mattermost.

That documentation machine-translated into German and then back into English looks like this:

There are some configuration settings you could know if your instance Matter Most violin

The sentence would be more ready-to-translate to say “There are a few configuration settings you can adjust when setting up your instance of Mattermost.”

Testing our documentation:

One “trick” to use to review documentation is to ask: “How would Agent Coulson explain this concept to Thor? [1]”

Agent Coulson takes complex ideas and explains them simply and effectively. Thor isn’t from earth, so we have to filter out ideas that are culturally specific–fiddles, baseball, wedding rings, etc.–and that makes things easy-to-translate.

As a communications company, clarity matters. If you see documentation missing these guidelines we’d gladly take bugs and pull requests.